SiMPLE | Forum

BF1942 runs almost flawlessly on my machine, which is running Ubuntu 18.04. I would imagine I would have no trouble with 20.04 at this point, either, since it's been out over a year. The only issue I currently have with the game is that every time the map changes, I lose keyboard focus on the game. Keyboard focus goes to the desktop. So, if I double-clicked an icon to start the game, and then I hit enter to pick my spawn point, it will try to start the game again. So, I have to press the Meta (Windows) key and kill the game that starts if I make this error. To avoid this, I need to Alt+Tab once after every map change, to get the keyboard focus back to the game. (I suspect that what causes this problem is that it restarts the game every time the map changes. That's what it seems to do.) That's the only problem I have with the game, other than issues that also occur in Windows, like the bad network code / bullet physics that make bolt-action rifles almost useless, but that's always been a problem in BF1942. If it weren't for that, the game would have been essentially perfect. Too bad they won't release the source code so that the community can fix it.

How did I install the game? I am not nearly as good with Linux as I hope to some day fairly soon be. I don't think I had the best video drivers installed until I installed either Steam or Lutris. I'm not sure which did it. I believe one of them also installed Wine for me, but I may have installed it manually. I don't remember. I installed BF1942 from my CD's, including the two expansions, into the Wine pretend Windows file system. I googled for the latest BF1942 patch, and downloaded the one on download.cnet.com, because I believe that's a site I can trust. I also installed SiMPLE's hacked client ("patch") here (team-simple.org/download/bf1942-v1.61-retail-patched.zip) in order for the game to use a working master server (to be able to see all the servers), to avoid the requirement of having the CD in the optical drive, and to have wide-screen support. I compared the hacked BF1942.exe to the original and found that only a few bytes were changed: some conditional jumps changed to unconditional jumps, as well as the master server address. So, it totally looked legit. And it does work as advertised.